For Earth Day, Bush and Kerry Vie on Environment

President Bush sought on Thursday to strike back at Senator John Kerry's attacks on his environmental record, traveling to within a few miles of his family's compound on the Maine coast to announce a new federal goal of expanding America's wetlands in the next five years.

For Mr. Bush, whose administration had been accused by some environmental groups of interpreting a Supreme Court decision in a way that would restrict protection of wetlands, the announcement appeared to be an effort to blunt an issue important in Florida and other key battleground states, in the Midwest and New England.

In turn, Senator Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, renewed his attack on Mr. Bush, saying that ''once again this administration is playing the smoke and mirrors game,'' arguing that Mr. Bush had initially supported proposals ''that would've lost us 20 million acres of wetlands.''

''Now they say they'll revisit it over the next five years,'' Mr. Kerry added at a rally at the University of Houston, ''but you know as well as I do, once they get re-elected, they'll walk away from that promise the same way they walked from all the others.''

The charges and countercharges on Earth Day underscored the degree to which the Democrats seek to make the environment an important campaign issue. At the same time, Mr. Bush is saying to sports enthusiasts who hunt and fish that he has been a good steward of the environment while balancing conservation with energy exploration.

Mr. Bush's aides clearly believe that they can blunt some of the attacks against his environmental record, and as he spoke here, Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, was working the edges of the crowd, signing autographs and having his picture taken with Maine voters.

Mr. Bush did not linger long -- he walked around a 1,600-acre national estuarine research reserve, about the size of his Texas ranch, and chatted with volunteers. Among those who came to listen to his brief speech was his mother, Barbara Bush, and Mr. Bush joked that he hoped she had been making his bed at the family house in Kennebunkport.

But he returned immediately to Washington, and plans to be in Florida on Friday for another event linked to the conservation of the Everglades. He told the small crowd on Thursday that the United States had ''responsibilities to the natural world to conserve that which we have and make it even better.''

White House officials pointed to Mr. Bush's budget proposal for roughly $30 million in new funds for the protection of wetlands and expansion of acreage. But before Mr. Bush had departed Maine, the Kerry campaign was already turning out comparisons of Mr. Bush's environmental record with Mr. Kerry's voting record in the Senate, and arguing that Mr. Bush was undergoing an election-year conversion to appear proactive on environmental issues.

Mr. Kerry, speaking in Mr. Bush's home state, Texas, to an Earth Day crowd of thousands, also took up the issue of oil, backing away from a charge he made days ago, when he relied on a passage in a new book by Bob Woodward to suggest that the president had made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia to lower oil prices in time for the November election.

On Wednesday, the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, denied making such a deal, and Mr. Woodward denied that his book said that one existed. In Houston on Thursday Mr. Kerry said, ''I don't know if it was a deal, I don't know if it was a secret pledge, I don't know if it was just a friendly conversation amongst friends.''

Mr. Kerry reminded a partisan audience at the University of Houston that Mr. Bush, as a candidate in January 2000, said a president ought to demand that OPEC members increase production. ''The president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the price,'' Mr. Bush said then.

Perhaps the most important element of Mr. Bush's announcement on Thursday was his call for the government to finish a complete inventory of the nation's wetlands. Like much surrounding his environmental record -- one of the most contentious areas of his presidency -- there is little agreement on the facts, much less the wisdom of his policies.

Estimates of the nation's inventory of wetlands are made regularly by both the Agriculture Department, which surveys only private land, and the Interior Department's Fish and Wildlife Service, whose surveys take in the entire continental United States.

The administration quoted a new Agriculture Department survey, which reported a slight net increase in wetlands on agricultural land, though it uses a slightly different and looser definition of the term wetland. It includes what the department called ''dysfunctional,'' or largely drained, wetlands, and produced a total figure of 110 million acres of privately held wetlands.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said that the agency's most recent survey, which covered the years 1986-1997, showed 105.5 million acres of wetlands, though it covers public land as well.

The chairman of Mr. Bush's council on environmental quality, Jim Connaughton, said Mr. Bush had made a huge leap in changing the government's conservation goal.

''Until today, the policy of the federal government had been to work toward no net loss of wetlands,'' he told reporters aboard Air Force One. Mr. Bush, he said, was now changing the policy to one of ''increasing the overall wetlands'' and improving their quality.

But he also acknowledged that Mr. Bush's new goal was made possible by ''a massive amount of work over the last 30 years'' to build incentives to preserve wetlands on both private and government-owned land.

Mr. Bush recently invited representatives of carefully selected conservation groups to his ranch to show what he and his wife, Laura, had done to preserve their own land, and some of those groups praised Mr. Bush's announcement on Thursday.

''We're pleased over all that he has made wetlands such an urgent theme,'' said Eric Kezler, the communications director for Ducks Unlimited, a conservation group in Memphis, that works to restore wetlands. ''He's trying to make more money available, and he's done pretty good things.''

David E. Sanger reported from Wells for this article and David M. Halbfinger from Houston. Felicity Barringer also contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2004, on Page A00016 of the National edition with the headline: For Earth Day, Bush and Kerry Vie on Environment. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe